Articles of apparel employ various fabrics in countless arrangements for reasons such as aesthetics, structural and functional purposes, and for comfort. Knit fabrics are often used in articles of apparel to provide advantages such as greater elasticity or stretch in one or more directions, to provide features for the user like increased warmth and comfort, and to provide performance features like resistance to wrinkles and good performance in wet and dry wet conditions. In addition to these advantages, knit fabrics are increasingly being used for commercial advantages like their ease of manufacturing via the use of commercial knitting machines.
The use of commercial knitting machines can allow fabrics and articles of manufacture using knit fabrics to be made in high volumes that use intricate knitting designs for their construction. In addition, the use of such machines can permit large portions of an article of apparel, and even the entire article of manufacture, to be created on the knitting machine during the knitting process that creates the fabric. For instance, knitting machines can create entire knit articles of apparel at the time of knitting, such as knitting an entire sock or a set of nylons at the same time as creating the fabric for these articles from the individual yarns. Further, in some arrangements, knitting machines can create articles of apparel that require little, if any, secondary processing for their construction, such as creating seamless articles of apparel that do not require stitching to complete their construction.
Although knit fabrics can be created in numerous designs and configurations for various purposes including aesthetic features, and they can combine different colors and types of yarns in the same fabric, the appearance and aesthetic features of knit fabrics are generally provided by the particular configuration of the yarns in the knit fabric rather than from pigments applied to the knit fabric, such as printing on the finished fabric that is common with other types of fabric. There are various reasons for the lack of printed designs on knit fabrics. For example, it is difficult to print on three-dimensional or tubular knit textiles for reasons such as difficulties with retaining and registering them to create quality prints due to the knit fabric being created in a non-planar configuration. As another example, the appearance of printed designs on knit fabrics is often diminished by the lack of ink being applied to yarns below the viewable surface during printing, which can become visible during use of the fabric due to flexing and stretching of the fabric and, thereby, interfere with the appearance of the printed design.